Playing Dead

CHAPTER 21

It surprises me that Adriana Marchetti looks so much like Maddie did at that age. That fact surprises me more than her wings made out of bright green leaves and her ability to fly. I look but can’t tell if she has all her fingers. She is waving, her hands a blur of motion. She dips into a puffy white cloud and disappears. When she appears again, her mouth is moving but no sound is coming out. She’s trying to tell me something.

I can’t hear. I can’t hear!

She swoops nearer and nearer like a creature in a 3-D movie until all that fills the screen is her perfect pink mouth and rows of tiny white teeth. She’s opening wide, her tonsils flapping. I’m about to be swallowed.

“Find me,” she taunts, as I slide down her throat and into the warm ocean. “Find me.”

I sat up, soaked with sweat, my heart pounding out of my chest. I stripped off my pajamas and lay back, shivering gratefully as the air-conditioning hit my wet skin.

Ever since I could remember, dreaming had been like stepping into a dark universe as vivid as real life. The coffin dream was the worst. Sometimes the two worlds collided and I woke up to ghostly faces at my bedside that vanished when I reached out to touch them. My eyes, wide open. My fingers stabbing the air to be sure I was alone. Granny called them night visitors. Scientists explain them away as a trick of the mind, a sleep disorder.

Just a dream, I assured myself. The child looked about three or four. Adriana wouldn’t be three. That was just her age as a statue in a garden. She was only one when she was kidnapped. There is no proof she is dead. And there is absolutely no reason to think that I have latent tendencies to communicate with spirits, especially since that gift ran on Daddy’s side of the family and I wasn’t at all sure who my Daddy was.

I glanced over at Hudson, breathing quietly and deeply in his soft gray cocoon, and thought how many times I had been uselessly naked in his presence today.

The clock flipped to 3:07 a.m., casting a blue glow. My heart slowed to a normal rhythm. My nerves, however, remained lit up like a string of chasing Christmas lights.

It seemed as good a time as any to check my email. I noticed that Hudson had brought my canvas bag, probably retrieved by the FBI in the library. My research had been picked up off the floor and was now tossed inside like a pile of trash. My laptop lay safely where I left it, inside its case on top of the desk. I threw on the T-shirt that Hudson had thrown off and sat down and powered it up. I went straight to email.

The third subject line screamed.

DO YOU REALLY WANT TO DIE THIS WAY?

Madddog12296 was definitely getting more direct.

This time I didn’t hesitate. I opened up the email. Blank space, except for an attachment labeled “The Bennett Show.”

My virus software went to work.

No virus detected, it told me cheerfully. I clicked “continue download.”

The first image filled my screen from edge to edge, familiar and confusing at the same time.

It wasn’t a virus, but it was very, very sick.

I couldn’t take my eyes from the slick horror show running on automatic in front of me. I had only several seconds to absorb an image before it faded out to bring another. And another.

Fred Bennett died violently in the kitchen while making popcorn. He’d put up an intense fight for his family. Every surface, every wall, every tile sprayed red like they’d battled with ketchup bottles.

The female FBI agent fell at the back door in the laundry room, her bloody head resting awkwardly in a laundry basket of unfolded towels.

Alyssa Bennett died with her beautiful blue eyes open. In the first picture from madddog12296, an image tormenting me since I’d opened it up on my phone at the ranch, her face had been turned away. It occurred to me now that was probably because he wanted me to imagine Maddie in her place.

In this one, Alyssa lay on the same ugly gray carpet and appeared to be reaching for her dead mother’s hand six inches away. The blood-spattered leg of another child stuck out of a doorway behind them. The boys’ bedroom?

I was familiar with crime scene photos. Before treating children, I insisted on seeing any tangible evidence of the horrible things they had witnessed. These pictures defacing my computer screen were definitely snapped with the aloof, detailed eye of a forensics expert.

The crime scene photographer never knew what might wind up being important, so his job was to shoot it all, the ordinary and the unimaginable: half-unpacked suitcases, the dirty contents of the dishwasher, a worn copy of Goodnight Moon on a nightstand, the Herbal Essence shampoo bottle in the shower. And, of course, every angle of every dead body, every single drop of blood.

About thirty pictures in all-probably not nearly everything that was shot that night, but the goriest highlights. These weren’t downloaded from a website. These were hacked from a police file or from the FBI’s photo archive.

I glanced over at Hudson. He hadn’t moved. My fingers stumbled over the keyboard while I forwarded the slide show to Lyle so his practiced, less emotional eye could run over this carnage.

It was still too early to get up, but I couldn’t imagine closing my eyes, knowing my brain would play the images endlessly. Better to focus on another task. Lyle had provided me with the password and access code for an extensive open-records site that the newspaper paid dearly for every year. Birth and death certificates, phone numbers, addresses, court documents-all only seconds away.

It didn’t take long to find Barbara Thurman. She was now Barbara Monroe, in her fifties and no longer a reporter covering kidnappings for a Chicago tabloid. I wrote down her phone number and address on the hotel notepad and shut down my computer.

Adriana Marchetti’s kidnapping, the murders of Fred Bennett’s family, the newspaper clippings from my mother’s safe deposit box. How were they connected?

An hour later, when Hudson’s watch alarm beeped, I was showered, dressed, and ready for a little more business in Chicago before my flight out tonight.

Madddog12296 had done his job. He’d dragged me to a hellish, fertile playground in my head that I hadn’t known existed.

Barbara Monroe lived in one of the renovated stone cottages in a gentrified neighborhood on Chicago’s South Side. A chaotic herb and flower garden meandered up the stone walkway, fighting off weeds, giving me a good vibe about her. In my occasional vegetable gardens, weeds rarely got the death penalty.

“Hi, guys, I’m Barbara,” she greeted Hudson and me, opening the door for us while holding the collar of a tall, lunging black animal that was hands-down the ugliest dog I’d ever seen. Black hair stuck out of bald patches. There were dime-sized red sores on his back that appeared to be healing. “Cricket, get back. Sorry, my teenage daughter has a thing for strays, and this one isn’t trained yet. Also, he’s not contagious, just ugly for life, according to the vet.”

I tried patting his bony, scaly head, bare of hair except for a tuft behind his ear, and he licked me appreciatively. Whatever happened to him, Cricket appeared to have sustained little psychological damage.

I’d called and introduced myself to Barbara only two hours ago, and she sounded busy but cheerful enough on the phone about helping. “I gave all that up a long time ago for a more lucrative PR career,” she informed me. “I’d met my first husband, and he didn’t like the idea of taking death threats in the middle of the night.”

Still playing tug-of-war with Cricket, she gestured to a cozy room on our right, bulging with books, antiques, and stacks of The Atlantic, the Utne Reader, and Scientific American. Again, a good sign. Someone who reads about intelligent life.

“Have a seat. Let me crate Cricket.” She and Cricket disappeared into the back of the house, and I zeroed in on the cardboard box open in the middle of the floor. How could I not? It called out to me in large black Sharpie letters: CHICAGO INQUIRER.

“Don’t even think about it,” Hudson said, pulling me with him onto a leather love seat. “Just wait for her.”

The box spilled over onto the floor with what I presumed were the oddball accessories of a newspaper reporter’s desktop-a dusty, tarnished trophy, a windup toy of a human peanut with Jimmy Carter’s face on it, a stained coffee cup that advertised the paper, miscellaneous clippings, a bulging Rolodex, and-most fascinating to me-stacks of old notebooks.

“Hard to believe I didn’t dump this stuff,” Barbara said. Unhindered by the dog, she stood an elegant five feet, eight inches in Manolo Blahnik heels and a well-cut black suit, vibrating with the kind of energy I’d seen in her reporting. I suspected that Barbara was a fierce competitor in the land of public relations.

She ran a hand through artfully chopped hair, too inky black to be anything but dyed, and picked up a lint roller from a library table, removing Cricket’s hairs from her jacket.

“I suppose I kept it all because I never got closure.”

“When did you quit?” I asked.

“A lifetime ago. Right after the Marchetti girl’s kidnapping. It was my last, and biggest, story. A career-maker, my editor told me. I didn’t have the stomach for it or I wouldn’t have let my husband talk me into quitting. Then, again, I was only twenty-five. What do you know at twenty-five?”

I nodded encouragingly. “I read the column you wrote telling everybody off.”

“Oh, yes. The naïve rantings of a young reporter. It was like spitting into the ocean. By that time, my boxes were packed. The publisher was ticked that my editor even let that column see the light of day.”

“You got actual death threats?” Hudson asked.

“Just two. The same guy. It was long before caller ID. He called to tell me to drop the story or he’d kill me in an unpleasant way. Real scary, because he called my apartment after midnight when I was alone in bed. Liked to wake me up.”

She kneeled and pulled out four more notebooks I hadn’t noticed, hidden out of sight on the floor behind the box.

“For you. I thumbed through these. There isn’t much I didn’t print.”

“It’s OK for me to take them?” Even years later, I was surprised Barbara could hand her notes off so easily. Lyle would rather cut off an ear.

“I never really believed Rosalina’s whole story. She was a drugged-out mess at the time, although she knew how to use her looks to pull the sympathy chain. I always doubted her, but the police thought she was telling the truth because of the witness to the kidnapping.”

I abruptly stopped flipping through the scratchings in her notebooks. “I didn’t know there were any witnesses.”

Barbara glanced at her watch. Platinum, I noticed. Not a reporter’s accessory. It made me rethink her a little. Her earrings were expensive hammered silver squares that matched a cuff on her wrist.

“It was a detail kept out of the press,” she told us. “I didn’t find out until several days after the kidnapping, when a cop slipped up talking to me. The witness was a stripper friend of Rosalina’s who claimed her pimp would kill her if he knew she spent an afternoon off-duty to be with Rosalina and her kid. She had one of those indulgent Italian princess names. Gabriella, maybe? I’m sure I wrote it in there. Her story matched Rosalina’s word for word, maybe a little too closely. The police cut her a break and left her out of it, and so did I.”

Barbara started stuffing everything back in the box, including the cheap trophy engraved with the inscription “Chicago’s Rookie Reporter of the Year,” which she angled so I would be sure to see it.

“Sorry to rush you, but I’ve got to go sell a campaign for an erectile dysfunction drug.” She winked. “That changes lives, too.”

This sophisticated, toned woman wasn’t at all the slightly plump, gray-haired Barbara with a vague memory of distant events that I’d imagined on the way over here. Apparently, I wasn’t what she imagined, either.

“I like you, Tommie,” she said. “You’re not what I expected. I’ve spent plenty of time on the couch. You’re not the usual brand of psychologist. You get what you need by really listening. Not casting silent judgment. It’s a better approach. Believe me, I know.”

She was gooping it on pretty thick. Maybe I hadn’t pressured her enough. And she seemed oddly relieved. How far to go was always the psychologist’s dilemma. It occurred to me that she hadn’t asked any questions at all.

Barbara opened up a black patent-leather shoulder bag that cost more than most people’s monthly mortgage and reached into a back pocket of a wallet, behind a lineup of shiny credit cards. She pulled out a tattered 3 × 5 photograph with a white creased line down the middle from being folded in half for a very long time, and handed it over.

It was a picture of a sweet-faced little girl perched behind a cupcake with a single lit candle. On the back, in faded blue ink, I could make out the name “Adriana Marchetti.” I’m pretty sure my face remained blank, something I’d become better at in the last week.

Barbara Monroe continued to contradict herself. A powerhouse PR woman and a matter-of-fact caregiver to down-and-out strays. A $1,600 purse, and a photograph memento of someone else’s probably dead little girl.

Barbara hesitated for a second and then reached inside her purse again, this time for a large manila envelope.

“I’ve decided to give you this, too. My husband-my third husband,” she corrected with a wry smile, “thinks I’m a little nuts to do this. But about two years ago, I did a press packet for a start-up company that specializes in age progression. You know, for missing kids and stuff. I asked him to age Adriana forward as one of the press kit samples. She was so young when this picture was taken that it’s a bit of a crapshoot. But if she’s alive today, she might look something like this.”

Before I could lift the flap on the envelope, Cricket howled from his gut-the slow, pitiful howl of a dog that knows he’ll soon be without human company-and Barbara hustled us out the front door. “Every time we leave, he’s still sure we’re never coming back. My daughter will be home from school to walk him in a minute. Or rather, Cricket will walk her.”

Barbara flicked her remote at the blue Audi sitting in the driveway, eyes now hidden behind dark, sexy sunglasses that gave her an instant pass into her forties.

She vanished behind the tinted glass, with words that I’d wonder about later.

“Don’t disappoint me,” she said.